Witness History
Episodes
The Jewish exodus from Iraq
12 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In the summer of 1971 around 2,000 Iraqi Jews were forced to flee the country following persistent threats and persecution. The Jewish community in Ir...
Legalising contraception in Ireland
11 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Contraception wasn't easily accessible in Ireland until 1985. Activists spent years fighting for the right to control their fertility but faced opposi...
Why a British MP was filmed taking mescaline
10 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
# Warning: This programme contains scenes of drug use #In 1955, a British member of parliament, Christopher Mayhew, took the hallucinogenic drug mesca...
The Great Wine Fraud
06 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In the early 2000s, Rudy Kurniawan was a newcomer to the hedonistic world of wine auctions in the US. He quickly became well-known for his warm and f...
Ursula Le Guin
05 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The American writer, Ursula Le Guin, was one of the most influential authors of the second half of the 20th century, publishing 20 novels in genres fr...
The IRA hunger strikes
04 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In 1981 the British government was faced with prisoners dying on hunger strike in a jail in Northern Ireland. The Irish republican activists were dema...
How Amsterdam became the cannabis smoking capital of Europe
03 May 2021
Contributed by Lukas
How Amsterdam became the home of cannabis coffee shops .The Mellow Yellow Café set a pattern in 1973 of attracting customers, which hundreds of other...
The killing of Osama Bin Laden
30 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The US tracked down the al-Qaeda leader to a city in northern Pakistan in May 2011. Special operations troops were sent to capture or kill Bin Laden i...
The battle of Tora Bora
29 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
When the Taliban were ousted from power in Afghanistan in 2001, the hunt for Osama bin Laden began in earnest. One American in particular led the sear...
The Nairobi US Embassy bombing
28 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In August 1998, more than 200 people were killed in co-ordinated bomb attacks on two US embassies in East Africa. They were among the first major atta...
Meeting Osama bin Laden
27 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
When the Palestinian journalist Abdel Bari Atwan agreed to go and interview Osama bin Laden in 1996 he was apprehensive. By the time he reached the Al...
The siege of Mecca
26 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In 1979 Islamist militants seized control of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, the holiest site in Islam. Hundreds were killed as Saudi security forces battl...
The first space shuttle mission
23 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
On 12th April 1981, the space shuttle Columbia made history becoming the first ever reusable space craft to fly into orbit. It marked the start of a 3...
How the NRA became a US political lobbying giant
22 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The National Rifle Association represents gun owners in the USA. In 1977 it faced a turning point when its members revolted against the organisation...
The Raymond Davis Incident
21 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In 2011, an American man shot dead two people in the streets of Lahore. The crisis that ensued saw accusations of espionage and US-Pakistani relation...
The return of Blue Lake
20 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In 1970, the Republican president Richard Nixon signed a bill returning a sacred lake to the people of Taos Pueblo in New Mexico. The lake, and surrou...
The Eichmann trial
19 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In April 1961, Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi official in charge of concentration camps, was put on trial in Israel.The trial helped reveal the full details...
China's 'Kingdom of women'
16 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The Mosuo community in China’s Himalayan foothills is matrilineal, so a family’s ‘bloodline’, inheritance and power is passed down through the...
The vultures saved from extinction
15 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
South Asian vultures started dying in huge numbers in the 1990s but no one knew why. They were on the verge of extinction before scientists worked out...
Fighting for Castro at the Bay of Pigs
14 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
On April 17 1961 a group of Cuban exiles launched an invasion of communist-ruled Cuba in a failed attempt to topple Fidel Castro. After 72 hours of f...
How a worm helped explain human development
13 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
After the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA in the 1950s, South African biologist Sydney Brenner was searching for a model animal to help...
The US Supreme Court's first woman justice
12 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In 1981, Sandra Day O'Connor became the first woman judge to be appointed to the US Supreme Court. She was nominated by newly-elected Republican presi...
Discovering the Jet Stream
09 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The Jet Stream is formed by powerful high-altitude rivers of air which circle the globe and help determine our climate. The existence of these winds w...
From Leningrad to St Petersburg
08 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
As the communist system in the former Soviet Union was collapsing in 1991, the people of Leningrad voted to drop Vladimir Lenin's name abandoning the ...
David Attenborough's first expedition
07 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In 1954, the BBC broadcast a new television programme in Britain. It was called Zoo Quest and it launched the career of a man who has since brought th...
Mexico's female serial killer
06 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Former female wrestler Juana Barraza was found guilty in March 2008 of murdering at least eleven elderly women in Mexico city over a period of seven y...
The women who reclaimed the night
05 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
How women in the North of England took to the streets in the late 1970s to protest against a serial killer dubbed the Yorkshire Ripper. Police advised...
Black Jesus
02 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
On Easter Sunday 1967 the Reverend Albert Cleage renamed his church in Detroit the Shrine of the Black Madonna. He preached that if man was made in Go...
Kidnapped on an orchid hunt
01 Apr 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In March 2000, two young English travellers, Tom Hart-Dyke and Paul Winder, were kidnapped by Colombian guerrillas while attempting to cross the notor...
Mrs Thatcher’s ground-breaking Soviet TV interview
31 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
How Mrs Thatcher shook up the Soviet media with a landmark interview in Moscow in 1987 focusing on nuclear disarmament. It was broadcast unedited and ...
When the prisoners ran the prison
30 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In March 1973 guards went on strike at Walpole maximum security prison in the US state of Massachussetts, and the prisoners took over. For the next th...
Anorexia nervosa
29 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The American singer, Karen Carpenter, died in 1983 of anorexia nervosa. She was one half of a world famous brother and sister duo called The Carpenter...
South Africa takes on big pharma
25 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
At the end of the 1990s, tens of millions of people across Africa had been infected with HIV and in South Africa hundreds of thousands of people were ...
The woman who got America talking about sex
24 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Dr Ruth Westheimer first became popular on a radio show in New York in the early 1980s. Her frank and open approach to giving advice on all sorts of d...
Jamaica’s ‘drug lord’
23 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The Jamaican government issued a warrant for the arrest and extradition of the drug lord Christopher Coke, otherwise known as “Dudus” in May 2010...
The Ulster Workers' Strike
22 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
An early attempt at power-sharing in Northern Ireland ended after protestant workers went on strike and bomb attacks killed dozens in the Republic of ...
The dirtiest chess match in history
19 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In 1978, the World Chess Championship between the Soviet champion and convinced communist, Anatoly Karpov, and the dissident and defector, Viktor Korc...
Mars-500 isolation experiment
18 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In 2010, six men were locked inside a simulated spacecraft on earth for 520 days. It was part of an experiment to see how humans would cope if cooped ...
Alva Myrdal - the woman who made modern Sweden
17 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In 1982, the Swedish social reformer, writer and diplomat, Alva Myrdal, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for her work on nuclear disarmament. She was...
Paris is Burning
15 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The documentary Paris is Burning was released in 1991 The award winning film showed a glimpse of the thriving underground ballroom and drag scene in N...
The woman who asked Britain to return the Parthenon marbles
11 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Melina Mercouri, famous actress turned politician, visited Britain in 1983 as Greek Minister of Culture and made the first official request for the re...
Jane: The underground abortion network
10 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
A group of feminists working under the name “Jane” carried out underground abortions in 1960s Chicago – when abortions were still illegal in mos...
Cixi: China's most powerful woman
09 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The Empress Dowager Cixi ruled China for 47 years until her death in 1908. But it wasn't until the 1970s that her story began to be properly documente...
The women of Egypt's Arab Spring
08 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In 2011 Egyptians took to the streets calling for the overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak, whose regime had been in power for nearly 30 years. Their ...
Churchill's 'Iron Curtain' speech
05 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In March 1946, the UK's former wartime leader, Winston Churchill, gave a historic speech which would come to symbolise the beginnings of the Cold War....
The Sharpeville massacre
04 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In March 1960, the South African police opened fire on a crowd of demonstrators in the township of Sharpeville, killing 69 people and injuring nearly ...
When US police dropped explosives on a Philadelphia home
03 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
On 13 May 1985 a police helicopter dropped explosives on a house in residential Philadelphia, in an attempt to end a stand-off with radical black acti...
Refugee Island
02 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In 2001, boats carrying hundreds of, mainly Afghan, refugees arrived on the tiny Pacific island of Nauru. This marked the beginning of the “Pacific...
The world's deepest dive 11km down
01 Mar 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Don Walsh was the first to go to the very bottom of the deepest part of the ocean in 1960 in a specially designed submarine, the Bathyscaphe Trieste. ...
The WW2 airman from Sierra Leone
25 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Johnny Smythe was one of very few West Africans to fly with Britain's air force during WW2. Recruited in Sierra Leone in 1941 he was trained as a navi...
The fall of Kwame Nkrumah
24 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The Ghanaian president, Kwame Nkrumah, was one of Africa's most famous independence leaders. But in 1966, while he was out of the country, the Ghanaia...
Ireland's bank bailout
23 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis Ireland had to borrow billions to stop its banks from going under and to keep its economy afloat. The ...
Acid rain
22 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In the 1960s, Swedish scientists documented how acid rain was poisoning lakes, killing fish, damaging soils and forests. Crucially they said it was an...
Mary Wilson
19 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The Motown group The Supremes had a string of number one hits in 1964. They would become the most popular girl group of the 1960s. One of the three or...
Free breakfasts with the Black Panthers
18 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The Black Panther Party hit the headlines in the late 1960s with their call for a revolution in the USA. But they also ran a number of "survival progr...
The Immortal Cells of Henrietta Lacks
17 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The story of an African American woman who played a largely unsung role in countless medical breakthroughs over more than half a century. Henrietta La...
Britain's forgotten slave owners: Part two
16 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
How one man used research by historians at University College London into Britain's forgotten slave-owners to track down the descendants of the family...
Britain's forgotten slave owners: Part one
15 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
It wasn't until recently that researchers working in the national archive in London discovered the extent to which ordinary people in Britain had been...
How US 'smart bombs' hit an Iraqi air raid shelter in the first Gulf War
12 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
More than 400 civilians were killed when two US precision bombs hit the Amiriya air raid shelter in western Baghdad on the morning of 13 February 1991...
A Ghanaian nurse's story
11 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Nurses from outside the UK form a vital part of the country's National Health Service. Many come from African countries. Cecilia Anim - who left Ghan...
The paper that helped the homeless
10 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In 1989 celebrities in New York set up the 'Street News' paper to help the homeless. People living rough sold the paper at a profit instead of begging...
Gay and lesbian support for the British miners' strike
09 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In 1984 a group of lesbians and gay men organised a benefit concert to support striking coal-miners. They sent the money they raised to a mining villa...
Francis Bacon in the archives
09 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Francis Bacon painted distorted and disturbing images but his works are now widely considered one of the great achievements of post-war British art. V...
DES Daughters
08 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
DES or Diethylstilbestrol was a form of synthetic estrogen developed in the 1930s, regularly prescribed to pregnant women to prevent miscarriage. But ...
General Robert E Lee: US Civil War rebel
05 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The US Civil War of 1861-65 left 700,000 troops dead. The Southern Confederate states rebelled against the Union of the North because the Confederates...
Drugs in the Vietnam War
04 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
During the Vietnam war, US commanders grew increasingly concerned about the widespread use of drugs by US troops in Vietnam. Initially the focus was o...
The Burma uprising of 1988
03 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
On August 8th 1988 the Burmese military cracked down on anti-government demonstrators, killing hundreds possibly thousands of people. In the weeks of ...
The Moscow State Circus
02 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The biggest circus in Soviet Russia opened in Moscow in April 1971. Circus was considered the “people’s art form” in the USSR and was highly pop...
The first Eurostar from England to France
01 Feb 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The first Eurostar train left London's Waterloo station heading for the Gare du Nord in Paris in November 1994. It was the first commercial passenger ...
The anthem of the Arab Spring
29 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In December 2010, anti-government protests broke out in Tunisia after a young fruit-seller called Mohammed Bouazizi set himself alight outside a gover...
Libya's Arab uprising
28 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In the early months of 2011 demonstrators took to the streets across the Arab world in what became known as the Arab spring. In February, protests in ...
Yemen's 2011 uprising
27 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Inspired by events in Tunisia and Egypt young Yemenis took to the streets in January 2011. Ishraq al-Maqtari was a lawyer and women's rights activist ...
Syria in the Arab Spring
26 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Protests erupted across the Arab world in 2011, people wanted change, an end to tyranny and dictatorship. But in Syria the unrest, and its put down by...
Egypt's Facebook Girl
25 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
A wave of popular anti-government uprisings swept through the Arab world in the early months of 2011. Many of the activists who took to the streets we...
Fighting for justice for India's Sikhs
22 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Anti-Sikh violence erupted in India after the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards in 1984. Looting, raping and killin...
Kenya's pioneering publisher
21 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
When Dr Henry Chakava became Kenya's first African book editor in 1972, there were virtually no books or educational material published in African lan...
The Turner Diaries - America's manual of hatred
20 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Following the assault on the US Capitol earlier this month, Amazon banned The Turner Diaries, a racist novel blamed for inciting American neo-Nazis to...
Hitler's beer hall putsch
19 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Adolf Hitler made his first attempt to overthrow democracy in Germany in Munich in 1923. It started at a beer hall called the Bürgerbräu in Munich, ...
Landing on Titan
14 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The story of the remarkable mission to land on Titan, one of the moons of Saturn. The large mysterious moon has a thick orange atmosphere. No-one had ...
Cornelia Sorabji: India's first woman lawyer
13 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
Cornelia Sorabji was the first woman lawyer working in India. She helped women living in purdah or seclusion in the 19th century who had no access to ...
Puerto Rican attack at the US Capitol
12 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In March 1954, a group of Puerto Rican militants opened fire from the public gallery of the US Congress in an effort to promote their fight for indepe...
When Spain's parliament was stormed
11 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In February 1981 armed Civil Guards tried to take control of the Spanish parliament. For 18 hours they held 350 politicians hostage in the debating ch...
The book that warned 2020 would bring disaster
08 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The Limits to Growth was published in 1972 and warned of global decline from 2020. Claire Bowes spoke to one of the authors of the book, Professor Den...
Sequencing the Ebola virus genome
07 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
When the deadly Ebola virus broke out in West Africa in 2014, scientists in the USA set to work analysing it. What they discovered would eventually le...
The 'strike' in space
06 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
The three astronauts on the Skylab 4 space research mission in 1973 got behind schedule when one of them vomited before they'd even got onto the space...
Buddhists and death row
05 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
In the 1990s a practising Buddhist called Anna Cox began visiting a murderer called Frankie Parker in jail. After his execution by lethal injection sh...
The oldest song in the world
04 Jan 2021
Contributed by Lukas
A 3,500 year old song was found on a clay tablet by archaeologists in Syria in the 1950s. Often called the Hurrian Hymn, it had been unearthed amid th...
Saving the Great Barrier Reef
31 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In the 1960s conservationists began a campaign to prevent the Queensland government from allowing mining and oil drilling on Australia's Great Barrier...
Le Corbusier and Chandigarh
30 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Shortly after Indian independence Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru persuaded the maverick Swiss-French architect, Le Corbusier, to help reinvent a newl...
The building of the Aswan Dam
29 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In July 1970, one of the largest dams in the world - the Aswan High Dam in Egypt - was completed. It had taken ten years to build, and was not without...
UNESCO and race and tolerance
28 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
UNESCO – the educational, scientific and cultural arm of the United Nations was first established in 1945. Its aim was to use education as a means o...
It's a Wonderful Life
25 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In December 1946, the classic Christmas film "It's a Wonderful Life" had its premiere in Hollywood. Starring Jimmy Stewart, the movie's message of hop...
Studio Ghibli - Japan's Oscar-winning animators
24 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In August 1986 the first Studio Ghibli film hit the cinema screens. It would go on to bring Japanese animation to a world audience. Hirokatsu Kihara w...
Satyajit Ray - India's master of film
23 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
Bengali film director Satyajit Ray has been described as one of the most influential directors in world cinema, with acclaimed US director Martin Scor...
The Sound of Music
22 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The heart-warming musical, The Sound of Music, was released in 1965 and went on to become one of the most successful films of all time. It was based o...
The Great Dictator
21 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In late 1940, The Great Dictator was first released in the USA. In his first role in talking movies, Charlie Chaplin satirised Adolf Hitler and his Na...
The GDR's Namibian children
18 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
On December 18th 1979 hundreds of Namibian children were taken to East Germany to escape the war in their home country. But after communism in Europe ...
The blockade of Gibraltar
17 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In December 1982, Spain reopened its border with Gibraltar after a 13-year blockade of the disputed British territory. The border was closed by the di...
British reality TV is born
16 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
The first British fly-on-the-wall documentary series aired on the BBC in 1974. It was called The Family and followed the lives of the Wilkins family i...
The birth of Bangladesh
15 Dec 2020
Contributed by Lukas
In December 1970 Pakistan held its first democratic elections since gaining independence from British colonial rule in 1947. The elections led to war...